


Blue Sky

by writingfanficlikeabus



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Coming Out, Gen, I Just Think Victoria Waterfield Doctorwho Should Be Gay And I'm Going To Let Everyone Know About It, Lesbian Character, sorta angsty about that but it all works out in the end!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:08:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27247048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writingfanficlikeabus/pseuds/writingfanficlikeabus
Summary: Something's been worrying Victoria. The Doctor wants to talk about it. Jamie is very bad at pretending he has a reason to leave them alone together.
Relationships: Second Doctor & Victoria Waterfield
Comments: 10
Kudos: 25





	Blue Sky

It was a beautiful day; hot but not too hot, with a clear blue sky framing the tops of the buildings. No threat of rain whatsoever, which had pleased the Doctor when he'd first peered, cautiously, out of the TARDIS, umbrella at the ready. 'England' and 'August' were two words that placed together didn't inspire him with much confidence as to the state of the weather, but today had thankfully proved him wrong. So far, the dry spell had held.

They'd parked the TARDIS a few streets away and wandered through the town, the three of them together - Jamie, Victoria, and the Doctor - until they'd arrived at the café. The Doctor had suggested they stop for some food - _lunch_ , he'd said, although it was probably only about eleven o'clock, local time. Something was on his mind, some reason he had for wanting to sit there rather than continue walking, only it wasn't clear what it was. That concerned Victoria, but she tried to console herself; if it was really serious the Doctor would surely have told them already. Anyway, there were no monsters around that she could see, no aliens climbing out of the cracks in the pavement to attack them, to make this beautiful day miserable and fraught with danger, so for once maybe it wasn't anything to do with that, and they were safe.

Victoria tore her eyes away from the sights of the street - the girl about her age that she'd made eye contact with suddenly and alarmingly - to look at the Doctor. He was playing a game of patience, the cards placed haphazardly on the table in front of him. Every so often he looked up and cleared his throat loudly at Jamie, who kept leaning too far forwards, casting a shadow over the game. Each time Jamie would say 'eh?', realise what he was doing, and sit back in his seat with an embarrassed cough and a look which seemed to say, 'I'm only doing this because I want to, not because you told me to'.

It had a comforting familiarity to it, as did much of what the two of them got up to, like the friendly arguments about the Doctor's ability to fly the TARDIS, or the attempts to explain some technological development to Jamie which usually ended up with him saying 'oh, _aye_ ', his code for 'I still don't understand this, but I don't care enough to try'. The Doctor apparently hadn't managed to decipher it yet, since he still made the effort each time, and Victoria hadn't the heart to tell him.

Then again, maybe he knew, and it was just a game the two of them played, another steady part of their friendship. They'd known each other much longer than either of them had known Victoria, had rhythms and rules to their relationship, some of which she might not know about even now, and as a result of it seemed inseparable. She could barely imagine Jamie without the Doctor, or the Doctor without Jamie; they'd probably travel together for the rest of their lives, if they could.

Which just left _her_. Victoria.

It was easy to think she'd stay with them, with that funny little man and his Jacobite friend, in the light of the sun. They had taken her in when she was lost, and shown her kindness, and she loved them for that. But the trouble was that they weren't always in the light of the sun. They were in the London Underground, fleeing yeti - or in a future Britain in the grips of an ice age, escaping towering Martians.

Occasionally the Doctor would look up and meet her eyes, and she would glance away. There was something contemplative about his expression today, something in the way he regarded her that worried Victoria. Worried her because _he_ seemed worried, on her behalf, and she hated the idea of concerning him unduly. Of course, it was nice to have someone care about you in that way, and she was grateful that it was the _Doctor_ who cared for her, but it _did_ make her feel self-conscious, especially because in this case there was really nothing to worry about. She'd talk to him about it if there was something, except for the ongoing problem of what she would do in the future, which for now she wouldn't bring up with him, because anyway she hadn't really decided what she intended to do with it or what her own feelings were yet. As he finished the card game (cheating, she was sure, backtracking on his own moves when he decided he didn't like them or when he realised he'd reached a dead end, but she didn't point it out) Victoria wracked her brains on what could possibly be bothering him about her. Her mind came up blank. Unless -

No, he couldn't possibly have noticed _that_. She'd hidden it from him very carefully. And if he had he would have brought it up already. Victoria was struck with a terrible vision of the Doctor looking horribly severe, all appearances of the fool or the father wiped from his face, ordering her out of the TARDIS.

She hadn't initiated it! That had been the girl - the girl they'd met a few stops ago, Liss. She'd been the one to take action, leaning in to kiss Victoria, who had fled before anything else could happen, hoping that no evidence of it appeared on her face. Maybe it had. Maybe it was a bit like that story the Doctor had referenced offhand once, about the man whose sins appeared on his face, in a portrait.

In the meantime, as her thoughts wandered down that path, the Doctor had begun to look panicked, patting down his pockets with increasing desperation.

"Oh my word!" he exclaimed finally. "I forgot to bring any money with me!" Casting around, his eyes fell on Jamie. He took on a placating tone. "Jamie, would you mind terribly if I asked you to go back to the TARDIS and fetch me something to pay the bill with?" He delivered the line very naturally, and Victoria wouldn't have suspected anything at all if Jamie hadn't then looked very deliberately between the two of them, said stiltedly, as though he was reading from a script,

"Oh, _aye_ , I can do that,"

and moved off with the gait of someone who fully intended to take as long as humanly possible in carrying out the task he'd been set.

"Victoria," the Doctor began - almost as soon as Jamie was out of earshot, in case there was any doubt that it had been a deliberate plan between the two of them. She braced herself for the conversation to come. But then he stopped, apparently unsure of where to go from there. Victoria waited, her heart hammering away in her chest.

"Is there something on your mind?" the Doctor eventually settled on.

Victoria ran briefly through all the things that were _on her mind_. If she wanted to stay with Jamie and the Doctor; where she would go if she _didn’t_ want to stay with Jamie and the Doctor; whether or not they'd be suddenly thrust into mortal peril in this nice English town; the kiss that she didn't want to think about and everything wrapped up in that; consequently, her father, who she had an uneasy feeling would have been disappointed in her, although she had no specific evidence for that because of course it would never have been something they'd have talked about together, not in a million years, not in 1866 or any date that followed in what should have been the ordinary course of her life.

"No, there's nothing," Victoria said. Nothing she could tell him, she meant. Although the Doctor was very old, and very strange, and seemed to know a lot of things that other people didn't, she couldn't imagine ever sitting down with him and explaining that a girl had kissed her, and because a girl had kissed her she was now unable to stop thinking about anything apart from whether she'd liked it, and whether she wanted to do it again, and whether she'd been like that all along or if it was some sort of disease, some sort of situation where once you'd fallen, you stayed fallen, like Adam and Eve taking a bite of the apple in the garden of Eden and being cast out forever.

She looked away from him. She didn't like to tell lies to the Doctor. In an ideal world she could have told him everything; they could always talk like they had near the very beginning, in the cybermen's tomb. But they couldn't, not with this.

Casting about for something to distract her attention, some excuse not to look at the Doctor, Victoria's eye fell on two girls walking on the other side of the street. They were making slow progress, ambling along as though they had nowhere better to be in the world and were taking joy from that. They were holding hands, swinging each other's arms back and forth while they walked.

As Victoria watched, one of them said something and the other laughed, leaning forwards for a kiss.

"Victoria?"

"Hm?" Her head jerked back towards the Doctor, as suddenly as if she'd been caught doing something criminal, not just letting her eye wander.

The Doctor didn't immediately pose the question he'd been meaning to put to her, but instead gazed after Victoria, at the two girls.

"A charming couple, aren't they?" he said, sounding pleased.

"Couple?"

"Oh yes, that sort of thing is quite normal by this period," the Doctor replied, cheerfully and entirely without artifice, as though he had no idea whatsoever how this was affecting her. "Not without some struggle, I might add, but your country sees the light in the end."

Victoria felt, suddenly, like she was about to cry. Which was silly - she hadn't even cried when her father had died, except a few times in her room, when the only people who might notice were the Doctor and Jamie if they happened to be in the vicinity, and definitely not in such a public place as this, where anyone might walk past and see her. And it was over such a small thing as well. She'd faced down monsters before, big scary hulking things, so why -

"Oh, Victoria," the Doctor said gently, fumbling in his pocket and pulling out, in turn, a pack of top trumps, tickets for _Casablanca_ , a bag of sweets, and at last a clean white handkerchief, which he handed over to her.

That was the last straw - that small gesture, the ridiculousness of the contents of the Doctor's pockets, which now lay strewn across the table. Victoria began to sob. She buried her face in the handkerchief, hoping that no-one would hear, hoping that she would run out of tears and then she could stop feeling so miserable.

At last she recovered enough to speak. "I'm sorry," she said wretchedly. "I've ruined the nice day out you wanted for us all." But when she looked up at the Doctor he didn't seem annoyed. He smiled and reached across to pat her hand.

"That's quite alright, Victoria," he said. "It's more important to me to know that you're happy than anything else."

This threatened to make her well up again, but she composed herself. "You said - it was normal now."

"Hm?"

Victoria forced herself to go on. "Those two girls, I mean."

"Oh, yes." The Doctor was about to launch into an explanation of the history that had led up to the time period they were visiting, but he caught the expression on Victoria's face and thought better of it. "It's nothing to be ashamed of, you know."

She looked down at his hands; at the table; at the top trumps, a battered old set with a picture of a t-rex emblazoned on the first card and the whole thing clumsily kept together by a rubber band, which almost made her smile, it was such a Doctor-ish thing for him to carry around. "I know."

"Good." The Doctor paused, although whether to gather his own thoughts or wait for her to say something was unclear.

"There was a girl -" Victoria began, but fell silent.

The Doctor smiled encouragingly. "Go on."

"Never mind." She couldn't talk about it just yet. The Doctor had said it was fine, and she trusted him, but she was still walking on untested ground, unable to quite shake the sensation that she'd done something horrible.

The Doctor, after waiting for a few moments, said, "Naturally it will take some time for you to get used to."

"Yes," Victoria said. Her voice shook more than she wanted it to, and it came out much too quietly. She wished she could sound stronger - but then, she reminded herself, this wasn't some terrifying creature that she had to stand up to, but the Doctor, who was looking at her as a compassionate father might look at a daughter.

That brought with it another pang, and Victoria came very close to crying again.

The Doctor smiled at her, and pulled his chair closer. "Listen to me, Victoria. It _will_ get easier. I know it might not seem like it now, but I promise you it will. Falling in love with another woman, and acting on that feeling, is no more inherently good or bad than if we were talking about the same situation with a man. It has just the same potential to bring you great happiness, if you'll let it. Do you understand me?"

Victoria nodded. She didn't yet trust herself to speak.

The Doctor smiled and patted her hand again. "Brave girl. Ah, and here's Jamie back with the money."

Victoria turned around. Sure enough, there he was, approaching the table cautiously.

"Is everything alright?" he asked once he was close enough, glancing uncertainly between the two of them.

"Oh, yes," the Doctor said, beaming, "I think everything's _quite_ alright now, isn't it, Victoria?"

"Yes," she said, and even managed a smile of her own up at Jamie. She was surprised to realise that it was true, at least temporarily. For a moment even the worst of her worries seemed perfectly manageable in the face of the beautiful summer day. Everything was absolutely calm and normal. But then -

"Oh, _Jamie_ , you picked up the wrong purse!"

"Well you didn't tell me what I was looking for! You just said fetch something you could pay the bill with, an' that had money in it, so -"

"But Jamie, these aren't even from the right planet!"

"An' just how was _I_ supposed to know that? Next time _you_ get it, an' don't go bothering me if you're going to complain -"

Well, she supposed that was normal too. Victoria started to laugh - laugh uncontrollably at the two of them, being so ridiculous over something that barely mattered. They stopped arguing with each other, shocked into indignation by her laughter.

"Now, really, Victoria, I do think that's _quite_ unfair -" the Doctor began.

It was a beautiful day; hot but not too hot, with a clear blue sky framing the tops of the buildings.

Maybe things would work themselves out after all.

**Author's Note:**

> me after writing exactly two queer second doctor era fics: I Guess This Is My Brand Now
> 
> anyway i really like the idea of victoria being one of the lgbts...it's About the discovery that the future holds more possibilities and ways of being than she grew up thinking there were. but! there is very little content for it so i'm hurling this out into the world i guess, ft. foreshadowing some companion departures


End file.
